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Old Society, New Belief

Religious transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries

Edited by Mu-chou Poo, H. A. Drake, and Lisa Raphals

A unique comparison of the early developments of two of the world's major religions

Old Society, New Belief

Religious transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries

Edited by Mu-chou Poo, H. A. Drake, and Lisa Raphals

Description

In the first century of the Common Era, two new belief systems entered long-established cultures with radically different outlooks and values: missionaries started to spread the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in Rome and the Buddha in China. Rome and China were not only ancient cultures, but also cultures whose elites felt no need to receive the new beliefs. Yet a few centuries later the two new faiths had become so well-established that their names were virtually synonymous with the polities they had entered as strangers. Although there have been numerous studies addressing this phenomenon in each field, the difficulty of mastering the languages and literature of these two great cultures has prevented any sustained effort to compare the two influential religious traditions at their initial period of development.This book brings together specialists in the history and religion of Rome and China with a twofold aim. First, it aims to show in some detail the similarities and differences each religion encountered in the process of merging into a new cultural environment. Second, by juxtaposing the familiar with the foreign, it also aims to capture aspects of this process that could otherwise be overlooked. This approach is based on the general proposition that, when a new religious belief begins to make contact with a society that has already had long honored beliefs, certain areas of contention will inevitably ensue and changes on both sides have to take place. There will be a dynamic interchange between the old and the new, not only on the narrowly defined level of "belief," but also on the entire cultural body that nurtures these beliefs. Thus, this book aims to reassess the nature of each of these religions, not as unique cultural phenomena but as part of the whole cultural dynamics of human societies.

Old Society, New Belief

Religious transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries

Edited by Mu-chou Poo, H. A. Drake, and Lisa Raphals

Author Information

MCP: Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei (1984-2009); Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2009- ).

H.A.D: Received his PhD in ancient history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970. He has spent his entire career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specializes in the history of the later Roman empire and interaction between Christians and pagans in the fourth century.

LR: Professor, University of California, Riverside (1998- ).

Contributors:

Robert F. CampanyRobert Ford Campany is professor of Asian studies and religious studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China and four other books on the religious and cultural history of China in the early medieval period.

Paroma ChatterjeeParoma Chatterjee is an assistant professor at the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her first book, The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy, was published by Cambridge University Press. Her second book project explores sculpture in Byzantium.

Huai-Yu ChenHuaiyu Chen is associate professor at Arizona State University where he teaches Buddhism and Chinese Religions. He has published on Buddhist monasticism, and the interactions between Buddhism and Christianity based on manuscripts from Dunhuang and Central Asia. He is currently working on projects about Buddhist rituals and Buddhist animals.

Harold A. DrakeH. A. Drake is Research Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.A specialist in fourth century Rome, he is the author of Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (2000) and co-editor of The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity (2014).

Natasha HellerNatasha Heller teaches in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research focuses on Buddhism during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, and in contemporary times. Heller's study of the Yuan dynasty Chan master, Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben was published by the Harvard University Asia Center.

Hyun Jin KimDr. Hyun Jin Kim is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Melbourne. He took his D Phil from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China (Duckworth, 2009) and The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Zongli LuZongli Lu is Chair Professor of Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School and Professor Emeritus of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. Author of Rumors in the Han Dynasty, Power of the Words: Chen Prophecy in Chinese Politics, AD 265-518, Comprehensive Dictionary of Official System in Imperial China, and Folk Deities of China.

Mu-chou Poo Professor of History, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Major publications include Wine and Wine Offering in the Religion of Ancient Egypt (1995); In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion (1998); Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China (2005). (Ed.) Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions (2009).

Lisa RaphalsLisa Raphals (??) is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California. She is the author of Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Cornell, 1992), Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (SUNY 1998), Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013) as well as many scholarly articles on comparative philosophy (China and Greece), history of science, religion, and gender.

Gill Raz Gil Raz, Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, specializes in medieval Chinese religion. His publications include studies of sacred geography, notions of the body and sexual practices in Daoism, and the interactions between Daoism, Buddhism, technical traditions, and popular practice in medieval China.

Michele SalzmanMichele Renee Salzman is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on the religious and social history of Late Antiquity. She is author of numerous articles and books, and most recently with M. Sághy and R. Lizzi-Testa co-edited Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition and Coexistence in Late Antique Rome (2015).

Mira Seo J. Mira Seo is Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS, Singapore, having earned tenure at University of Michigan. She was educated at Swarthmore College, Christ Church Oxford, and received a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton. Her first book is Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry (Oxford 2012); her current project is the rhetoric of money in Roman literature.

Roberta Stewart Roberta Stewart is Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College. She has authored two books, Public Office in Early Rome: Ritual Procedure and Political Practice (1998) and Plautus and Roman Slavery (2012). She has published articles on Roman religion, Roman numismatics, Latin literature, and Latin lexicography (for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich).

Sze-kar WanSze-kar Wan is Professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA. He has written on Pauline studies, postcolonial criticism, biblical studies, and hermeneutics.

Chuan-ying YenChuan-ying Yen is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Her works include Selections of Buddhist Stone Rubbings from the Northern Dynasties, Taipei, 2008; "Examining the Dunhuang Mogao Cves 323 and 332 in relation to the Liangzhou Buddha," in Rethinking East Asian archaeology : Memorial essay collection for the tenth anniversary of Kwang-chih Chang's death, Taipei, 2013.

Yin ZhouYin Zhou is an Assistant Professor at Chongqing University, China. She studies early Buddhism in China, specializes in Buddhist iconography and architecture and their interaction with social and political history.